Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

“I’m not getting played by you again. I’d rather have you dead.”

“At the cabin.” The words squeaked out. “They’re at her place in New Hampshire in a…in a hole under the floor.”

“What room?”

“In front of the fireplace. It’s under the rug.”

“Is it locked?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Where are your copies?”

“I don’t have copies.”

“You’re full of shit. There is no way you didn’t keep copies for yourself.”

“She told me she’d have me buried alive if she ever found out I’d taken anything from her. She knows people…people who are in those archives. They’re bad. She knows people like that. I believed her.”

“I’m sure you believed her, Stewart. You just didn’t think she’d ever catch you, because you’re so goddamned smart. How would she ever know that you kept your own copies to get off on because you can’t get a date to save your life, and you have to force yourself on a girl to ever get any?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“Yes, you did. You knew exactly what you were doing, and you enjoyed it.” I nudged him with the gun. He squeezed his shoulders together and punched his head forward and away from contact with the barrel.

“I kept electronic files. No hard copies. I didn’t want her to ever find anything. My copies are all on the C drive. There aren’t any more. Please.” His head was still forward, his neck distended. He started to cry. “Please don’t kill me.”

I made him wait a few more seconds before relieving the pressure.

“Move over to the CPU very slowly, and take out the hard drive.”

He slipped over, barely raising his head, and went to work. He had become impressively docile, which was why I let him stand up when he was finished and hand the drive to me.

“Get me the other one, too.”

He put his hands lightly on his hips and shifted his weight, which gave him a slightly less-docile profile. “I don’t have another one.”

“You have a D drive. I saw it in your directory when I was here with you last time.”

“All my personal stuff is on the D drive-my taxes and my address book and my-”

I raised the gun and smashed the butt down on his keyboard. The tray it was on sheared off its mooring under the desk with a loud crack. Everything tumbled to the ground. Then I shoved one of his monitors over the edge of the desk. It teetered and finally crashed down onto the pile.

“Okay.Okay. Stop!” His arms flailed at nothing. “I’m doing it. Stop it.”

He fell to his knees next to the CPU and made all the appropriate disconnections. He handed me the second drive, but when he tried to wobble to his feet, I reached down with the barrel of the Glock and tapped his shoulder.

“Stay down, and put your hands behind your head.”

His raised his arms slowly. I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders started pistoning in time with his loud sobs. “I did everything you wanted. Please, don’t kill me. I’m sorry for what I did. Please.”

I stared at him kneeling in the ruins of his audio equipment, gasping for breath. I hadn’t come intending to hurt him. I certainly hadn’t planned on killing him. But my focus began to drift as I stared at him trembling and begging on his knees and thought back to the way he’d enjoyed taking his pleasure from me when none had been offered. It didn’t help that Stewart scared for his life and Stewart having sex released approximately the same odor. Smelling him again made me think about the way he’d hovered over me, searching my face for reactions I had refused to give him. He had gotten off on the dominance. Now he was completely vulnerable to me, and I thought of all the things I could do to pay him back, right up to and including putting a bullet in his brain, and I wondered if I could do it.

I put my finger on the trigger and lifted the gun to his head to see…just to see what that might feel like.

“Don’t.” More whimpering. “Please, don’t. You lied to me. You said we would fuck, and then you walked out.”

It didn’t feel real. It felt like TV or the movies. Bo had warned me that it was a light trigger, so I touched it gently, caressing it with my finger. In my mind, I felt the gun kick. I felt his blood and brains blow back on me. I breathed in the smell of cordite and felt it burn my nasal passages. But then the smoke cleared, and it was quiet, and all I felt was the big void that would open up in that room if he were dead and I was the one who had made him that way. If his soul departed, leaving me standing alone with a smoking gun in my hand, there would be too much space around me, probably forever.

I dropped the C drive on the floor, the one with all the dirty movies, and stomped it hard. That felt so good, I stomped it again. And again. I stomped it until Jamie’s mistake was pulverized and my mistakes were demolished, until what I had done with Stewart was ground into powder and grit and tiny metal shards embedded in the hardwood floor. I kept stomping until I could barely raise my leg, while Stewart cowered next to me in a classic duck and cover. Then I dropped into the swivel chair to figure out what to do next.

I reached down under the desk, grabbed a handful of the wires and cables, and gave them a vicious yank. All the electronic toys they were supplying jumped and flinched and popped and eventually went dark.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

He did so promptly. I put the gun down, wrapped one of the cables around Stewart’s left wrist, and tied it off. As I tied his left hand to his right, I gave him his instructions.

“I’m going to call Angel now. When she answers, I’m going to put the phone to your head and you’re going to give her a message from me.”

“What about my D drive?”

“I’m holding on to it. I don’t want you calling her back after I leave. That’s how you keep me from stomping it, too. Do you understand?”

“What do you want me to tell her?”

ANGEL’S CABIN WAS COMPLETELY DARK. I looked through the window, and it reminded me of looking through Monica’s apartment window. For a moment, I expected a face, maybe Angel’s face, looking ghoulish instead of gorgeous, to pop in front of me.

I listened to the stream flowing nearby and tried to calm down. My heart was barely keeping up with me. I had left Stewart tied up on his floor, then gone out to my car and pointed it toward this place. On the way, I had called and checked on various quarters. Bo and Tristan and Monica were fine. They were playing Trivial Pursuit, guns at the ready. When I told Tristan where I was going, all he said was to be careful. If Stewart had kept his word and not called her back, Angel would be looking for me at the Ritz-Carlton, but we both knew there was no guarantee that Angel had believed him.

I went back to the window, took a deep breath, and rammed my elbow through the glass. It wasn’t easy. I had to hit it a few times. Fortunately, the window cracked before my elbow did. I pushed the glass into the house. It fell onto an un-Angel-like yellow quilt that was lying neatly over a single bed below the window. I reached in, found the lock, unhitched it, and scrambled through, careful to crawl around the glass on the bed.

No one was around, but still, I winced when I put my feet to the floor and heard the floorboards creak. Using my flashlight, I found my way to the bedroom door and out into a hallway. With one hand glued to the wall and the other holding the flashlight on the floor in front of me, I made my way to the den.

I probably could have turned on a light but felt more comfortable down on my hands and knees with the flashlight. Every piece of furniture had a rug underneath it. I found one that looked as if it had been moved recently. It had a minor speed bump in it. The chair that sat on it was heavy, but once I got the right leverage, it tipped right over. I grabbed a corner of the rug, flung it completely out of the way, and found what I was looking for. Cut into one of the wide planks of the floor was a small, neatly milled, rectangular trapdoor. I stared at it, breathing hard. I hadn’t realized how winded I was. I mopped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve, but it didn’t do any good. I was damp again immediately.